Thibault Defert sits in his racecar in the shelter of his team’s pit garage. His only immutable belief in life is that he was destined to be right here. Now, he would rather be anywhere else.

When Dmitri slammed head-on into his watershed moment, he was behind the wheel of a Ford F-250 doing eighty up I-5, somewhere north of Azalea, Oregon.

Born weeks apart, Julep and Ellis were playmates from the start and had been classmates through 10th grade.

My ex-girlfriend is there when I get home from work. I find her sitting on the couch, wearing nothing but a pair of black lacy knickers and one of my old shirts, rolling a fag in front of the TV.

It had been a week since I'd last left the house. I'd barely made it back last time.

There’s all these picturesque poems, anecdotes about scattering loved ones’ ashes. Things meant to be profound, symbolic.

After such a pleasant stay at the conference in New Mexico, where his talks had gone well, and everyone had been so kind, it was distinctly uninspiring to fly home to a wife whose love for him had long been in doubt.

“Go to Goldman’s Greenhouses. Joseph … will start you … at a buck sixty an hour.” His lungs empty of smoke, “Go talk to him. He’s your uncle. He’ll hire you.

Crib Goch is the hardest route up Snowden, it’s classed as a grade one scramble, which means that you can’t, or shouldn’t, do it in weekend sneakers, although I’ve seen worse.

Mimosa Mitchell was an 85-year-old “pillar of the community” and matriarch of one of the most prominent families in Petunia Springs.

I had known Bill for five years but had never seen him outside the office. “Don’t you find that strange?” Annie asked me one evening.

The thunder in the rolling blanket of clouds marked a season of cleansing, a time of remembrance. It was also a time of death. The Sailor knew that well.

That afternoon, she still believed that her father had not meant what he had done. Once the black cloud had lifted, as it always did, he would come to his senses and beg Mum’s forgiveness.

When a friend asks Ethan to test out his new navigation app for a journey across the country, Ethan happily obliges. However, as with most new apps, it's not uncommon to run into a few bugs along the way.

Zena could hardly believe that she was on a plane, gazing down over the North Island. Everything she knew about New Zealand came from Luke’s photographs and postcards: sparkling lagoons, snow-capped mountains and silver ferns.